Saturday's Storyteller: "Marv noticed that something was terribly wrong with the baby."
by Belinda Roddie
Marv noticed that something was terribly wrong with the baby. It started with the diaper changing. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof. The baby could eat and eat and eat and nothing could come out. No massive stains or stink. While that perhaps was a minor relief for Marv, his wife reminded him that this could be something much more dangerous.
So he took the baby to the hospital, where Doctor Oswald told him that all was normal and didn't seem to take the situation too seriously. The couple went through everything - scans, X-rays, even a look into the baby's intestines for blockage. But the lack of negative symptoms alone were enough to make the doctor say that perhaps the two were overreacting.
They weren't overreacting. But no doctor in all of Sonoma County seemed to want to listen.
A week after the initial anomaly, Marv was doing his usual midnight check-in on the baby when he noticed the bumps on his head. They were perfectly symmetrical - round beads of raised flesh - and for a brief moment Marv was sure that the baby was in fact the spawn of Satan growing out its horns. He raced back to his bedroom where his wife bravely attempted to sleep (of course not to much avail), dangling their child in front of her face.
"Purify it!" he screamed, though the words were also inspired by a distinct lack of slumber. "The power of Christ compels it!"
But the bumps did not become horns. Instead, they began to move. Quite literally move. They were on the back of the baby's skull one day, then behind his ears the next. They kept moving down through his neck, and of course it didn't seem to hurt him. Another trip to Doctor Oswald, however, proved to be a little more fruitful this time around.
"Perhaps it's a parasite?" the doctor asked, but again, the baby was not losing weight. A strange tropical illness? They had never been in the tropics. Doctor Oswald stereotypically tapped his pen on his clipboard and sighed.
"Bring him back in five days even if nothing's changed," said the doctor. "And whatever he may cough up, take note of it."
And one day, he did cough, and he did splutter, and as Marv and his wife scrambled to assist their seemingly choking child, he spat out the two lumps that had traveled so fluidly around all parts of his body beneath his epidermis. To his parents' amazement, the two lumps were two brilliant little nuggets of gold. Pure, malleable gold, stuff that could be flattened into a delicate leaf with a pound of the palm.
"Well, I'll be," Marv murmured, "was he doing some sort of medieval alchemy in there?"
Marv and his wife decided not to alert Doctor Oswald of the gold's appearance, but to their simultaneous joy and disappointment, the baby went back to his usual process of "decomposition." In a small, hardly notable medical book written by a hippie-esque physician, this was actually a rare phenomenon called "Gold Mine Syndrome," and it only seemed to hit about 2% of worldwide infants only once or twice. A Grecian family had had twins that had spat out five lumps of gold each and struck it filthy rich - until the 2008 recession, that is, and they squandered it on cruises.
Meanwhile, Marv and his wife were happy that all was right, although Marv couldn't help the pun: "Our baby is really a gold mine, isn't he?"
That got him a prompt slap in the face with a hand bedecked with a newly crafted gold and diamond ring.
This week's prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.
Marv noticed that something was terribly wrong with the baby. It started with the diaper changing. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof. The baby could eat and eat and eat and nothing could come out. No massive stains or stink. While that perhaps was a minor relief for Marv, his wife reminded him that this could be something much more dangerous.
So he took the baby to the hospital, where Doctor Oswald told him that all was normal and didn't seem to take the situation too seriously. The couple went through everything - scans, X-rays, even a look into the baby's intestines for blockage. But the lack of negative symptoms alone were enough to make the doctor say that perhaps the two were overreacting.
They weren't overreacting. But no doctor in all of Sonoma County seemed to want to listen.
A week after the initial anomaly, Marv was doing his usual midnight check-in on the baby when he noticed the bumps on his head. They were perfectly symmetrical - round beads of raised flesh - and for a brief moment Marv was sure that the baby was in fact the spawn of Satan growing out its horns. He raced back to his bedroom where his wife bravely attempted to sleep (of course not to much avail), dangling their child in front of her face.
"Purify it!" he screamed, though the words were also inspired by a distinct lack of slumber. "The power of Christ compels it!"
But the bumps did not become horns. Instead, they began to move. Quite literally move. They were on the back of the baby's skull one day, then behind his ears the next. They kept moving down through his neck, and of course it didn't seem to hurt him. Another trip to Doctor Oswald, however, proved to be a little more fruitful this time around.
"Perhaps it's a parasite?" the doctor asked, but again, the baby was not losing weight. A strange tropical illness? They had never been in the tropics. Doctor Oswald stereotypically tapped his pen on his clipboard and sighed.
"Bring him back in five days even if nothing's changed," said the doctor. "And whatever he may cough up, take note of it."
And one day, he did cough, and he did splutter, and as Marv and his wife scrambled to assist their seemingly choking child, he spat out the two lumps that had traveled so fluidly around all parts of his body beneath his epidermis. To his parents' amazement, the two lumps were two brilliant little nuggets of gold. Pure, malleable gold, stuff that could be flattened into a delicate leaf with a pound of the palm.
"Well, I'll be," Marv murmured, "was he doing some sort of medieval alchemy in there?"
Marv and his wife decided not to alert Doctor Oswald of the gold's appearance, but to their simultaneous joy and disappointment, the baby went back to his usual process of "decomposition." In a small, hardly notable medical book written by a hippie-esque physician, this was actually a rare phenomenon called "Gold Mine Syndrome," and it only seemed to hit about 2% of worldwide infants only once or twice. A Grecian family had had twins that had spat out five lumps of gold each and struck it filthy rich - until the 2008 recession, that is, and they squandered it on cruises.
Meanwhile, Marv and his wife were happy that all was right, although Marv couldn't help the pun: "Our baby is really a gold mine, isn't he?"
That got him a prompt slap in the face with a hand bedecked with a newly crafted gold and diamond ring.
This week's prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.
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